Alternator

And I ask myself, yet again,

that why, when my mind wanders

lost in the dark that dawns

with the dimming of the bedside lamp,

does it always seem to follow the paper trail

back to you?

Those scraps, scrawled so long ago, and erased,

then rewritten for the sake

of mere posterity;

shavings of pencil sharpenings and rubber

flank the winding road of heartbreak,

and heart mend,

only to find the damn thing ended up broken

again.

Like a faulty alternator, the movement of myself

through life cannot charge my heart, not on its own.

Electric paths along nerve endings long grown numb

with the overkill from the days when my heart

used to beat truly.

Until the pills became the building blocks;

the semblance of a sanity I’d hoped to forget

with love.

Until I talked myself mute about the topic;

the mountains of my tongue eroded smooth

by the rivers of my words, and your touch…

Now there are only murmurs.

The whispers of memories on the wind -

a hand that reaches for another to hold

and is met only by its opposite.

Sometimes my heart skips,

picks up the beats I missed from songs we used to sing

and tries to place them back into myself,

where they should fit -

where they used to fit - but don’t

anymore,

like a square trying to force itself round enough

to match a circle,

or the electricity trying to light the bulb

and finding no filament to latch onto,

or the pen trying to unwrite

what has already been written,

and taken to heart as the truth.